Tell me if I’m wrong – I let a motorcycle club into a government building to escort a seven-year-old to her hearing, and now I’m facing a formal review.
I’ve been a social worker with the county for nineteen years. I have a caseload of forty-three kids right now, and every single one of them is somebody’s worst day. But this case – this little girl – she’s the one keeping me up at 3 AM staring at the ceiling fan.
Her name is Brooke. She’s seven. She weighs forty-one pounds. And in two weeks, she has to sit in a room fifteen feet from the man who put cigarette burns on her arms and tell a judge what happened to her.
Brooke stopped talking in April. Not selectively, not sometimes – she just stopped. Her foster mom, Denise Kowalski (51F), called me crying on a Tuesday saying Brooke hadn’t said a word in eleven days. Wouldn’t eat at the table. Slept in the closet with the door shut. The therapist said it was trauma regression, that the upcoming hearing was triggering it.
I’ve worked with an organization called Riders Against Child Abuse for about six years. They’re a biker group – big guys, leather vests, Harleys. What they do is show up for kids. They stand outside courthouses. They sit in hallways. They make a scared kid feel like somebody massive and loud is on their side.
I called their chapter president, a guy named Dale Meacham. Told him about Brooke. He said they’d be there.
The morning of the hearing, eight bikers showed up at the family services office on Greenfield Road. Vests, boots, the whole thing. They were quiet. They were respectful. Brooke came in holding Denise’s hand, saw them lined up in the hallway, and Dale kneeled down and said, “Hey Brooke. We’re your friends. Nobody’s gonna hurt you today.”
Brooke looked up at Denise. Then she looked at Dale. Then she said her first word in twenty-six days.
She said, “Promise?”
My supervisor, Terri Hagen (58F), came around the corner and lost it. She said I had NO authorization to bring “unvetted civilians” into a secure facility. She said I created a “safety liability.” She pulled me into her office and told me I was being written up and that a formal review would determine whether I’d violated protocol.
My friends and family are split. Half of them say I should’ve gone through proper channels, filed the request, waited for approval. The other half say a little girl SPOKE for the first time in almost a month because someone made her feel safe.
Terri sent me the review notice yesterday. But that’s not what made my hands shake.
It was the attached email – forwarded from the county attorney’s office – and when I read who requested the review in the first place, I had to sit down in my car for twenty minutes.
Because it wasn’t Terri.
What the Email Said
The name on the request was Gary Purcell.
I stared at it long enough that the words stopped looking like words. Gary Purcell. I know that name. Every caseworker in our county knows that name. He’s a family court attorney – defense side, primarily. Has been for about twenty-two years.
He represents Brooke’s father.
I don’t know how he found out about the bikers. I don’t know who told him. But somewhere between that Tuesday morning in the hallway on Greenfield Road and the following Thursday, Gary Purcell had drafted a formal complaint to the county attorney’s office alleging that I had introduced intimidating, unvetted third parties into a pre-hearing environment in a manner designed to influence a child witness.
That was his language. Influence a child witness.
I read it three times in my car with the heat running because it was forty-one degrees and I couldn’t make myself go back inside. Forty-one degrees. Forty-one pounds. I kept getting those two numbers mixed up in my head.
His argument, as far as I could parse it from the legal language, was that by surrounding Brooke with large, imposing men in the hours before her testimony, I had effectively coached her emotional state. Primed her. Made her feel that she had an army at her back specifically so she’d be more willing to testify against his client.
Which, I mean.
Yes. That’s what I did. That’s exactly what I did. I don’t know how to be sorry about it.
Nineteen Years
I want to be clear about something before I explain what happened next.
I am not a rogue employee. I have never been written up. I have a commendation from 2019 for work on a sibling reunification case that took four years to close. I have sat with kids in emergency rooms at 2 AM. I have driven to Walmart at midnight to buy a ten-year-old a coat because the foster placement fell through and nobody thought about the coat. I have attended six funerals for children who were on my caseload or had been.
I know the protocols. I know them because I helped write two of them. Terri knows that.
So when I walked back into the building and knocked on her office door, I wasn’t defensive. I was tired.
She looked up from her desk. She had the review notice in front of her. She’d printed it out and there were yellow highlighter marks on it, which is very Terri.
I said, “You knew it was Purcell.”
She didn’t answer right away. She took off her reading glasses and set them down in that deliberate way she has, where she’s buying herself two seconds to decide what version of the truth she’s going to use.
“I received the complaint and I had an obligation to forward it,” she said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
She looked at me for a long time. “Sit down, Carla.”
What Terri Told Me
Her name is Carla, by the way. That’s me. I’ve been writing this whole thing and I realize I never said that. Carla Hatch. Forty-four years old. Divorced. One cat named Biscuit who is, objectively, not a very good cat.
I sat down across from Terri and she told me the thing she’d been not-telling me for three days.
Purcell had filed the complaint the same afternoon as the hearing. He was fast. He’d clearly been watching for something he could use, and I handed it to him. The county attorney’s office flagged it because it touched on a pending case, and they were the ones who forwarded it to Terri with a note that said the department might want to get ahead of it.
Terri’s version of “getting ahead of it” was initiating a formal review before Purcell could escalate to a judicial complaint about witness tampering.
“I’m trying to protect you,” she said.
“By writing me up.”
“By creating a paper trail that shows the department took it seriously and self-corrected. That’s better than a judge hearing about it first.”
I understood the logic. I didn’t like it, but I understood it. Terri isn’t cruel. She’s a person who has spent thirty years in a system that runs on documentation and liability management, and she thinks in those terms the way I think in terms of what a scared kid needs at 7 AM on a Tuesday.
We’re not wrong, either of us. We’re just working on different clocks.
“What happens to the hearing?” I asked.
She picked her glasses back up. “That’s not affected. The hearing proceeds.”
“And Brooke?”
“Brooke’s testimony is what it is. Purcell can try to argue the emotional support angle but it’s a stretch. She’s seven. She’s allowed to have support.”
I nodded. Then I asked the question I actually came in there to ask.
“Did Dale Meacham’s guys do anything wrong?”
Terri was quiet for a second. “No,” she said. “They didn’t.”
Dale
I called Dale that night from my kitchen. He picked up on the second ring, which is always how he answers – like he’s been waiting.
I told him about Purcell. I told him about the review. I told him I was sorry for putting his organization in the middle of something that might get complicated.
He was quiet for a moment. Not the uncomfortable kind of quiet – just the kind where someone is actually listening and not just waiting for their turn.
Then he said, “Carla. You know how many times we’ve been to court?”
I said I didn’t.
“Thirty-one times in this state alone. We’ve been subpoenaed. We’ve been called intimidating, threatening, a gang, a mob. We had a judge in Harlan County tell us we were a public safety hazard.” He paused. “You know what happened every one of those times?”
I said no.
“The kid testified.”
He didn’t say it like a victory. He said it the way you say a fact you’ve had to repeat so many times it’s just become part of the furniture.
I wrote it down after I hung up. The kid testified. I don’t know why. It just felt like something I needed to keep somewhere.
The Day Of
I should tell you what the actual hearing was like, because I’ve been building to it and I don’t want to skip past it.
Brooke wore a pink sweatshirt with a cat on it. Denise braided her hair that morning, two braids, a little uneven because Denise will be the first to tell you she’s not great at braids. Brooke had a small stuffed rabbit that one of Dale’s guys – a big quiet man named Terry who barely said ten words the whole morning – had brought for her. He’d just held it out when she walked past him. Didn’t make a thing of it. Brooke took it without looking at him and didn’t put it down.
She went into the room with her CASA volunteer and the child advocate attorney. I waited in the hallway with Denise and two of the bikers. The hallway smelled like floor wax and old coffee. There was a water fountain with a piece of tape over the button that said OUT OF ORDER in marker that looked like it had been there for years.
We waited forty minutes.
When the door opened, the child advocate came out first. She found me with her eyes immediately and she did this very small nod.
I had to look at the water fountain for a second.
Denise grabbed my arm and didn’t let go. She said, “She did it?” and I said “I think so” and Denise made a sound I’m not going to try to describe.
Brooke came out holding the rabbit. She walked straight to Terry, who was standing against the wall with his arms crossed, and she held up the rabbit toward him like she was showing him something.
He looked down at it. “Yeah?”
“His name is Biscuit,” she said.
I almost told her that was my cat’s name. I didn’t. Some things you just let be what they are.
Where It Stands
The review is still active. I have a meeting with HR next Wednesday. I’ve been told to prepare a written account of my decision-making process, which I’ve started three times and deleted twice because I keep writing things like I did it because she was forty-one pounds and she hadn’t eaten at a table in three weeks and I was out of other ideas and I’m not sure that’s the format they’re looking for.
My union rep, a guy named Phil Doran who has the energy of someone who has seen everything twice and is no longer surprised by any of it, says the review will most likely result in a formal note in my file and a policy clarification memo about third-party access to county facilities. He thinks the Purcell angle actually helps me – because it makes the complaint look retaliatory rather than procedural.
Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve stopped trying to predict what systems do.
What I know is this: Brooke testified. She said what she needed to say to the people who needed to hear it. She named the rabbit Biscuit and she let a stranger with a leather vest and hands like cinder blocks make her feel like she had backup.
The hearing is done. The review isn’t. Gary Purcell is still out there, still billing hours, still doing whatever it is Gary Purcell tells himself he’s doing.
And I’m still up at 3 AM. But it’s different now. It’s not dread anymore.
I don’t have a better word for what it is. I’m just awake, and the ceiling fan is going, and I’m not sorry.
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If this one got to you, pass it along. Someone else out there needs to read it.
For more stories that make you question everything, check out The Man at the Defense Table Nodded at Me Like I Was There to Help Him or see what happens when someone runs a background check on their neighbor’s new boyfriend in Tell me if I’m wrong – I ran a background check on my neighbor’s new boyfriend and what I found made me stand up in the middle of our block party and say it out loud. In front of everyone..
